This is a little off topic, but it’s a big deal to me 🙂 We hit a major milestone this week. Daughter #1 is off to school. (For my non-US readers, that means university.) We have just one daughter at home, who starts high school this week. Sending a child to school is not like […]
I’m in the midst of writing the PM book (which is why I haven’t blogged much). One of my tips is that projects have both requirements and goals–and that the PM (at least) needs to know the difference. A requirement can be a use case, user story, a shall statement, whatever. So can a
I’m leading several sessions at SD Best Practices, Sept 11-14, 2006. Here’s the list: Monday, Sept 11: Coaching Your Peers and Staff to Excellence (half-day experiential) Wednesday, Sept 13: Predicting Project Completion Wednesday, Sept 13: Develop Your Interviewing Skills Thursday, Sept 15: Managing the Project Portfolio Thursday, Sept 14: Successful Software Management: 15 Lessons
There’s a fascinating email thread started by David Anderson about What would Agile Auditing Look Like?. Part of the discussion stems from what the definition of an audit is. Audits are about compliance to a defined process. Do we need audits? Sure, for some projects. I would very much like to know that any project
Want to save time on your next project? Improve working relationships? Understand what contributed to your success–or what didn’t? You’ll need a retrospective to do these things, and if you want a great retrospective, you’ll buy a copy of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. A retrospective provides
A number of people still subscribe to this blog with an email subscription. I had used Bloglet to do process the emails, but the service didn’t always work. And to be fair, Bloglet was a free labor of love 🙂 I’m now using Feedblitz, assuming I didn’t make any mistakes. As always, feel free to
It’s been quite the Monday so far. My office toilet started spewing water, a cabinet door fell off one of the cabinets in the kitchen, and I’m trying to back up and duplicate my hard disk because both latches on my Powerbook broke at the Agile conference and I need to send my computer
Several years ago, a colleague emailed me, asking how to keep sponsors involved. My colleague was using company-mandated phase-gate lifecycle with long project durations (18-24 months). I’d recommended providing a project dashboard and showing the sponsor progress. My colleague was stumped–the dashboard wasn’t particularly helpful until they were in the testing phase and it
If you’ve ever tried to look at my articles page, you know how hard it was to find anything. Well, my updated version of the site is finally up. I have a few broken links, which I expect to fix, hardware willing, in the next week or so. If you find anything broken, do let
A couple of weeks ago at our Managing One-on-One workshop, Esther and I were teaching about how to give feedback. Here’s the “recipe”: Create an opening to deliver feedback. Describe the behavior or result in a way the person can hear. State the impact using “I” language. Make a request for changed behavior. When